I try to do my good deed for the community, but there’s only so much one man can do …
Also with the advent of discord a lot of the old lore discussions from the forums moved over to discord servers.
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I see them as info-kiosks/town criers, making it clear IC “what’s going on” at current on the server. This is where the “4th wall” element comes in because they’d somehow have knowledge of major events irrespective of where they are for example “Dere be a mighty conflict going on in Northrend atm mon, if ya wanna lend ya blade you’d best get on de wyvern right awa’” when said Troll has no real means of knowing that. But it would provide a very valuable function for those who are curious, but to the degree where they’re on AA or regularly browsing the forums, so they’re pretty open to RPing, but it feels like it’s located somewhere in the building and they don’t know how to get there, but once they get there, they’ll be fine.
This is where Hel’pah the Troll comes in, to help them get there in an obvious in-game manner. So long as his existence is well publicised in an obvious place such as forums or via reminder in game chats like Trade etc, it provides some WD40 on the matter for those who are kinda half-in/half-out on RP, largely because they’re unsure how to engage with the community. Having someone facilitate that for you can make a massive difference in the first instance, and once the first time is done, they should be much better at doing it on their own.
If not, they can always ask Hel’pah what’s going on again, and he’ll tell them, and they if they recoginse any names he mentions, they’ll know “its the same guys from yesterday”.
Such individuals could be identified by a singular guild tag that has a mirror on opposite faction to make them easy to spot (with a distinctive attire, kinda like gamemasters of old).
because one thing i’m certain of is on AD even if there are people who don’t actively RP any more, but used to, those who RPed “once upon a time” do care about RP and keeping it going and this might be the kind of role they’d be open to doing, even if they’re past RPing “actual” characters.
EDIT: Just had a pretty nifty idea to make it slightly smoother to handle on an IC basis; you make both mirror guilds fully composed of Pandaren, as they can de-facto talk to each other, they have a very distinctive model and are rare, so they stand out. As they’re generally less involved in whatever faction plots blizzard come up with, it’s plausible then to have a group of them behave as kind of “bystanders and narrators” of what;'s going on afaik - Tushui Lorewalkers and Huojin Lorewalkers.
Given people who would be willing to volunteer for a task would be presumbely somewhat dedicated, the idea of chugging a panderen through the starting zone isn’t a massive ask for the explicit purposes of performing this role.
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I was going to purchase the new book and do a breakdown of it on the AD forums so people can get what they need from it if it turns out to be hot trash. But I don’t think i’ll have the time, really.
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If you can scan it over to PDF I can give you a helping hand.
Oh please do if you can!
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This is an absolute 20 IQ argument. Before I was a roleplayer I was on a PvE realm in a raiding guild, got sick of that, moved to AD at some point cause I was curious about roleplay. It really is not that hard to understand. People that have no intention to RP, nor learn to RP and can only sprout “IMAGINE RPING LULW Pepega Clap” should not be on this server. End of.
RP is something you either want to do / are curious about - or have no intention to and are just on the realm for the other 20 IQ arguments I often hear;
- I’m here for the friendly community lol
- I like watching RPers as if they’re some sort of circus animal to entertain me
- B-but we need OOCers for raids, auction house items and transmogs!
I’m also not sure what you mean by ‘‘playstyle’’…? Are you saying that RPers somehow need to ditch their playstyle, be it the form of PvE, collecting stuff, or PvP? Seeing as I know quite a bunch of RPers who do the aforementioned content. Why would someone need to ditch their playstyle in order to RP?
I really do not care about Classic nor what was the norm 15 years ago. It was a completely different time with different mindsets and players. How is it scary to want to have a community and one server purely for roleplayers? If you are a RPer or aspiring RPer, why would you feel scared? The whole OOCer stuff should not even be relevant to you; as you are, in the end, a RPer or aspiring RPer - which means you’re using the server for its intended purpose.
Secondly, your ‘‘99%’’ is another completely wack take tbh. I’m pretty sure the vast majority of RPers are not IC 100% of the time. Everyone, at some point, is OOC. Myself, especially, would never pay a subscription purely for the sake of RP. I love WoW, doing PvE, collecting stuff - however, on top of that, I still RP.
??? Personal space? What? Lmao. Do we need our safe spaces now?
So you agree that lagging out the server, people spamming twitch memery, gamer words and other slangs in /s and /y whilst then going to the Sunwell to do a ‘‘gambling casino event’’ in the form of a Longboi Deahtroll is RP.
I’m sorry but if you unironically think this then you’re stupid. I’m a big fan of Asmon, however, I feel he is in the wrong here. He may have 1400 days played, over 30k achievement points, however, he is not a roleplayer - and it hurts to see him and others pretend they actually know entirely what roleplay is about. Which they obviously don’t, seeing as I feel that the majority of folks think that RP is just playing a giant female Draenei with you-know-what.
I disagree. Just because people ERP, grief, and are 100% OOC, doesn’t mean they are roleplayers. If we’re looking at from a more precise point of view, ERP would be considered roleplay, but it’s not really a thing the TOS condones - nor belongs in WoW. Normally, in other games that are 18+ or on other platforms, I couldn’t care less. It just doesn’t belong in WoW. But if you actually think the other two things can be counted as roleplay, you’re just a big Pepega my dude.
Pretty sure there are official rules / guidelines. I could be wrong on this, though.
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Preach this! In 10 characters! Wait, I already used more. But yes, preach! 
Edit:
There were, on the old WoW website. Now, not so much. The only really official guideline for RP servers we have right now is the naming convention.
Yeah and that’s a massive problem
The tag is RP realm not immersive names only realm (as if names are enforced …)
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It really is. For new roleplayers or players who just want to know more about RP realms in general, I can recommend reading this:
https://wow.gamepedia.com/Roleplaying
and
https://wow.gamepedia.com/Roleplaying_FAQ
There aren’t.
One thing that would help is reclaiming the areas used by OOC and ERP back to mainstream RP.
The two areas in Stormwind which could be nice RP zones are Trade District in Stormwind which is really never used by RPers as traditionally its always from vanilla just been a place OOC people gather (because back then it had the AH and bank), but dwarf district has both these now and RP happens there.
Other place is Goldshire, roleplayers go out of there way to avoid it or even going through the place, I know when I was in Stockades Finest and we were based at Westbrook Garrison whenever we went off somewhere instead of walk through Goldshire we would take a big detour around it.
It effectively means it has given this whole area to the OOC/ERP crowd. No RPers bother them there so they all but own it.
I think we need to claim back the areas like this for proper RP, that means holding proper RP events there, pushing the groups of people misusing these areas out of them. Disrupting the ability for them to do the seedy ERP in these areas. If you deprive these people having hubs that they can gather at you will go a long way to pushing them off the realm.
It of course at first will be hard to remove them, any proper RP event held in these types of areas is going at the start get disrupted badly, but if we the serious RP community were to come together in large enough numbers and keep pushing these places I believe we would after a time be able to reclaim them for proper RP again.
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Today I received a somewhat-positive feedback to a “compound ticket” I had on the issue. A roleplayer GM advised me to keep reporting; however, he also said their community team have followed the threads on both AD and general and that they’ve passed info along to their development team (which I assume was a remark for the sharding abuse I mentioned).
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Would be nice to remove the degenerates from the human starting town for sure, I would be on board with this.
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My two cents:
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You can be loud, but you must be respectful and constructive.
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You should indeed try using different social media for this, not the WoW forums where no one cares.
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To show that AD is a good and fun server, you should avoid as much pointless drama as possible (Which is probably impossible, but it doesn’t hurt trying).
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That’s good news. We all need to keep at it - our collective 9.99/month should have enough purchasing power to have the server’s rules enforced / it’s community protected
I won’t get into it too much in the interests of the thread I don’t agree - it has started a conversation / has brought light to some problems this realm has with OOC griefing / lack of moderation and we wouldn’t be having this talk if people didn’t take a hard-line stance
It’s ultimately just some based dialectics. Obviously nobody actually believes that all OOC players will be fired into outer space by Blizzard but we can definitely hope to meet in the middle and have the moderators moderate instead of wearing blank smiles + saying everything is great while the server continues to descend
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I think it is good if we all can push up our efforts in example reporting bad behaviours, unfitting names and so on as that is a minor but still important part in cleaning up the realm.
But in the end I think building large and strong communities which is accessible to new or returning roleplayers is one of the most important factors to increase the overall roleplay activity on the server which will natural push away some aspects of the OOC presence not wanted.
Too many times I have noticed people coming here on the forum or trade chat in-game and people not able to really help them with direction towards where they could test out their character.
But over the past years we have seen increase of communities and I think that it have made some aspects better but I think to push it further and also try to make it more aware of which communities are around so you can give them who seek these communities out a proper way to access them.
Completely agree. They need to be reused and people need not to back down. At current the misuse of them is somewhat legitimised in the eyes of observers as nobody seems to want to use them (we know why, but let’s not get into that).
If people start using them again and are dogged in their pursuit, it creates more of an onus to do something about it. At current the argument for change is weaker because it looks like RPers are “making do” with what they do have. If instead it’s a case of “no, we want to roleplay here, so we will” and then the tickets come in, blizzard will presumbely have to take an interest because either the ticket cost will be high (due to repeated infractions) or it won’t (which suggests the RPers are being left alone, which is then a victory).
Not that everyone should do it, as it will result in many a fruitless night being disrupted and some people want to actually RP undisrupted at some point, but people should definitely consider to start doing this more once in a while to make it clear we want these areas back.
That is to say, it’s not about saying NO OOCers present whatsoever, because that will never happen, but rather if you can end up in a scenario where they’re basically just completely ignoring and avoiding going near any RP whilst in these areas, that would be a massive win would it not? I can’t see how blizzard would reasonably humour a request for them to have the right to afk in the middle of trade district when RPers want the ground space, when they could easily fly for 2 seconds and AFK on an obscure roof somewhere.
I think Elenthas hit the nail on the head here about building bridges as opposed to burning them. As much as OOCers and ERPers are two very big problems on the server, it is a naive assumption to act as if they are the only issues with our community, and shifts the blame entirely off of ourselves into a meta-narrative of Us V. Them; when a lot of the time, it’s Us against Ourselves.
An important step is recognising that the OOC issue is one that resonates with just about every community. RP Announce, a very different community to the PCU, likewise is trying to contact Blizzard about the dire need for an RP-served rule review in terms of griefing and phasing. We all play this game and share a hobby, and it’s better to have some form if unity in The Last Roleplay Server™ than larger communities dunking on others as if they’re superior (this isn’t about RP Announce, they were just used as an example of another large community with different values).
AD has always gotten high on drama since the beginning, but we shouldn’t let ourselves believe that’s the way it has to be. Hit me with all the “saint mogi/bad mogi” memes you want, but I’m still someone who genuinely wants to see an improvement to the server I’ve been on for nearly ten years and want to see an end to the plethora of issues plaguing it, including OOCers and ERPers, without acting as if our own toxicity is not a separate and valid issue of its own. The first thing I see when joining a new community discord shouldn’t be linking RPers’ AA’s without their consent and talking about how terrible their concept/character is; funny or not, it breeds the wrong sort of energy.
Speaking of AA, Watrus is entirely correct in saying it’s woefully outdated. I’m one of the more active users of the site, and it is embarrassing how 2006 the site still feels after nearly 14 years. It was my guild on Alliance that created some more “unique” looking profiles, which led to emails from the team with concerns and requests to change them back to the ugly and clunky default.
Correspondence with the AA team has shown they are very reluctant to embrace ant sort of significant change or site revamp, and so I fear AA is very much going the way of losing relevancy to the point of redundancy. It’s incredibly sad because I adore the site, but the team’s refusal to change domain means it’s likely we’ll have to make a new domain ourselves in the next few years when the site croaks its final breath.
This is a good thread, and an important one. The fact I usually disagree with Perroy and am saying that shows this OOCer issue really is something with the capability of uniting historically divided groups of RPers - from House RPers to creepy blood elf children RPers, everyone hates griefers. You won’t find a serious RPer who doesn’t - even the Dragon expresses distaste, even if he tended to underestimate their prevalence.
I’m on my phone so sorry if the post worded anything badly. Point is that it’s important to look inward at ourselves as a community as well as towards the outside threats, and building bridges is important at this time as much any anything else. Feel free to hit me with the panda-gandhi memes but I’m not sure how else to prove this post is made in sincerity.
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A valid point, Mr. Perroy…
However…
What we really need is someone to go to Blizzcon and call out the developer team for not looking after us and letting rampant ERP go on unabided, and ask them what can they do to better facilitate RP in RP realms and what tools can they give us to deal with OOCers and people that ERP.
Edit: Or if you want to go ultra crazy you get some tosser leaflet to write an article about the ERP problems.
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Absolutely true, people need to push the boat out and involve new RPers. Even if someone’s typing is not so great / they make newbie mistakes, if they’re honestly trying and acting in good faith that shouldn’t matter
In the PCU we make sure to take in some true fixer-uppers - one such success story is posting in this very thread …
We actually disagree on very little fundamentally - your problem with me I think is that I seem unpleasant a lot of the time and that is because I am unpleasant a lot of the time because when you’re leading a community that now numbers in many hundreds you can’t always be the friendly PR guy. In this thread I am making an effort to be every bit the forum politician but make no mistake - the moment someone mugs off the group of doylem I’m responsible for, you will see my eyes turn red instantly - like a furious (and also extremely powerful) mother hen defending her nest
Furthermore I will say as an aside that I am actually very forgiving and have only very rarely turned someone away if they asked to make peace and turn over a new leaf - because if I harboured an infinite grudge against every seasonal villain in my life’s story I would have no time to have fun on this server
I would literally bury the hatchet with the likes of Vaxir if they asked for that in good faith
It’s luckily something this server is very good at (esp. me)
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